Wednesday, July 07, 2010

WEDNESDAY, 6/31/10Wife and kids were gone again, which meant I watched a movie and napped on the couch instead of running. Finally got up and moving around and went for a late-night run around 9pm.

Cloud cover and rain seemed to drop the temperature a good bit, so the run was more enjoyable than normal. Did 18 minutes, which is my longest run to date. Did right at 1.7 miles in that time frame, but at a few points, I really pushed it. I normally don't try to push my speed, but I was using the lap setting on my stopwatch and wanted to try to run each section evenly. Don't think I did a very good job of it, but by the end, I felt pretty good about my overall pace and time. I'm still really struggling with that 15 minute wall...I can push past it for a few minutes, but it's still very hard.

MONDAY, 7/5/10I have lots of excuses why I didn't run on Thursday, Friday, Saturday or Sunday. But none of them are good. However, Monday night, I got out there and gave it a shot. I was worried that I might have regressed, but I am happy to say that...I RAN 20:45!

If you've followed this particular blog series, you'll know that a 20 minute run has been a goal of mine since I started. I've tried running before, but I've never gotten this far. I should have pushed it to 21, but I was trying to run the "square" in our neighborhood 5 times without stopping and once I hit my finish line, I started my cool down.

The square is a bit easier to run longer distances, so I may stick with that. My legs did fine; even the incline stuff didn't seem to bother me that much. I like running at night for the coolness, but I'm not crazy about running after a full day of eating. I have serious vomit-phobia and will do almost anything to prevent regurgitation. The stomach did okay...I had tried to stop eating earlier in the evening so I wouldn't have that "full" feeling. The hardest part was the breathing. Rhythm was okay, but it was a bit of shock to the lungs to do the run. (For me, that's typical when I go longer than a couple of days between exercising. Breath tends to regress more noticeably than other aspects of running.)

It feels like I'm getting over a bit of mental block. For example, after a run that's 15 minutes or more, I'm not anxious to get it over with. I'm starting to want to run more. My body is following suit to an extent, but it's still a bit removed from the desire to go further.

TUESDAY, 7/6/10Played with the idea of going playing it safe and trying something around the 15 minute range, but decide to go for the 20 minute run again. It was tough. Everything was tough. Legs, breathing, nausea...the whole thing.

But I pushed through and did a 20 minute run again! Granted, I didn't go as far in the 20 minutes as I did on Monday night, but considering that my body was saying, "Please wimp out, man" the whole time, I felt pretty dang good about my 20 minutes! If do run on Wednesday, I think I'll have to scale it back, though. Since 20 is so new and still tough, I probably need to make space them out a bit.